Hitchin West - Cowboys and Indians

Making our way up highway 318 into Wyoming.

We stand on the side of the road for awhile and then spot an outdoor seating area next to the Taco Bell across the street. We help ourselves to a cement bench and make sandwiches, grateful for Jim’s  beer to wash it down. 

Just as we sidle up to the road, a black truck pulls off before we had a chance to raise a thumb. 

Kenny is a Navajo. His long black hair is braided into a ponytail that falls down between his wide shoulders. His grandfather, who passed away several months ago, was a code talker in World War II, fighting the Japanese in the volcanic islands of the Pacific. Just before he passed, he told Kenny that if he knew where the U.S. was headed after World War II, he never would have joined up. “They’ve ruined us, but all you can do is turn away and keep your family going,” Kenny says with a sigh. 

We are told of the pow wows he attends, where all the Indian nations meet. They dance for hours, smoke peace pipes, and feast. 

“If something is wrong with you, you go to the medicine man who points you to the right healer. You take peyote together and sing out the hole in the teepee.”

He lets out a laugh and smiles wide, laughing like a child. For a moment I wonder if he isn’t just. As if reading my mind, he points to a photo I hadn’t noticed taped to the dashboard. It’s him in full warrior attire, complete with a magnificent, colorful beaded shirt. Kenny taps his finger on the photo twice. “That’s me.”

We pull off the road where some sort of mining, maybe fracking, operation is going on. Just high desert with small prefab houses, trailers, equipment, and chain linked fences. Kenny tells us he’s got to pick up his check. He runs inside a hut flying an American flag and comes out a few minutes later with an envelope. We continue for a while until he needs to turn off the road to head home. Kenny wishes us luck and tells us to keep our heads about us. “These are good people around these parts, but you never know.” He names a town near Yellowstone we should avoid where he’d done six months for a DUI, and with that, he drives off. 

We ask a few people around the gas station for a ride with no luck. Stand around the edge of Craig, CO for about twenty minutes. A middle-aged man with a cowboy hat, long grey mustache, denim shirt, and an old truck with an empty trailer and four cases of beer in the bed, rolls to a stop. 

“Where yas headed?” 

“Jackson”.

“I’ll take you to Maybell”. 

Lucie and I throw our bags in the bed with the beers and hop in. 

Kevin is a rancher and rents horses to dude ranches and “rich city folk.” Lucie tells him that she’s never met a real cowboy before and asks to take a picture. Kevin laughs and says, “Sure, long as you don’t send it to the FBI.” 

Born in Texas, lived in Wisconsin, then Michigan, ended up in Virginia “chasing a southern bell” ‘til that went bad, moved back to Michigan, had a farm, ‘til that went bad too. Now he’s a horse rancher living on 56,000 acres of the most beautiful high desert country in Northern Colorado. 

We are soon versed on the legends of the outlaws who used to gallop down Hwy 119. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used this freeway to get back to their Hole-in-the-Wall hideout in between train robbing and brothel visits. Tom Horn, a soldier turned gun for hire shot an outlaw through the neck as he drank his morning coffee on his little homestead, now a pile of timber off the side of the road. 

Kevin even includes the prehistory. “Dinosaur bones were found in these parts. Shark teethe and mango trees fossils too. That means we’d be swimming some years ago.”

We pass a herd of elk and I ask Kevin if he does any hunting.

“I don’t get much thrill out of killing critters, the meat is good eatin’ though. City folks come up here, don’t admire the country, just want to shoot something.” 

After almost an hour chatting gently winding through the high desert mountains, Kevin offers to put us up for the night. 

We pull off to the left side of the road into a circle of low buildings. A house, barn, sheds, and a few trailers, all set up in a loose circle. Drink a beer waiting for Mary and Kallie to arrive, Kevin’s wife and daughter. Mary looks part Native. We can tell she isn’t too thrilled to have some hitchhikers drinking her beer in her kitchen when she walks in  after a long day of work. Kevin smooths things over and he and Kallie take us out to meet their horses. Horseshoes welded onto chains are the gate latches. As he unlatches the gate, I see Kevin limping. He tells me that he’d been riding some years back when a rattlesnake spooked the horse he was on. He got bucked off and the horse reared up stomping on his ankle, shattering it. 

The horses walk right up to us, immediately surrounding Lucie. I’ve never seen such affection from such huge animals. We pet their snouts and backside as if they were dogs. 

Kallie hops on a horse, bareback, and takes off, braids bouncing, Broncos Jersey flapping, sandals tucked into her waistband. She’s twelve. We watched her tear across the field, holding on to the mane , leaning from side to side as the horse navigates the waist-tall sage bushes. When they slow down to a trot, the horse has  that dance to its steps that only a horse with a little bit of wild still left in it can do. 

We head back to the house where Kevin packs a cooler and takes us on a ride around his property to see some wild horses. We stop at a ruined homestead built into the side of a hill and walk inside, ducking under the fallen planks of wood. Kevin cautions us with our “Jesus sandals” on to watch out for rattlers and scorpions. “It’s the small ones you have to worry about.”

Kallie spots some elk and tells Kevin to stop the truck. She climbs on the roof and starts making elk noises, calling them over. They seem fooled for a moment until they realize that the truck isn’t a lonely cow and take off down the hill. I try to imagine any other twelve-year-old I know who could make elk calls. I can’t. I used to bring a duck call into music class just to blow at random times when Mrs. Jansen’s back was turned during our mandatory sing-a-longs. But that doesn’t really count. 

We reach a wide plane with over thirty wild horses grazing. We get close to a beautiful mare with a dark brown coat, almost black at the hooves. This is one of Kevin’s who ran off by jumping a bigger fence than the one now separating him from us. Kevin doesn’t seem too worried about it and has a plan to get him back. Somehow it is centered around the fact that wild horses, apparently, will not go through gates. 

We stop by another homestead, succumbing to neglect and time. The front door is several feet down in the ground. We are told that one day the well dried up and the old owner, drunk on whiskey, tried to remedy this by dropping a few sticks of dynamite down the hole, thinking that might just do the trick. 

“That’s back when you didn’t need a permit to buy TNT,” Kallie informs.

 

We make it back to the house as the sun streaks shades of reds, pinks, and purples across the sky. Mary is in a much better mood. She asks about us, very curious about life in Czech Republic, as she serves grilled deer sausage and canned green beans. 

After “shootin’ it” around the dinner table for a while we walk outside. The stars light up the sky. Maybe more than I’ve ever seen before. Kevin walks us over to the trailer we’re be staying in. He pauses in front of it and tells us his “spook” stories. 

The one that sticks out goes like this. 

“The poor old lady who once owned this trailer never owned anything nice her whole life. One of her sons came across some money and bought her this real nice trailer here, complete with a washer and dryer. This lady’d never known such a treat. Well, about eight months went by and I suppose she couldn’t handle the luxury and all and she just tipped right over.”

Kevin bought the trailer for next to nothing and, “Sure as hell, I walked in that trailer one day and wouldn’t you know, the washer and dryer were both running. Nothin’ in ‘em! I hope one day after I tip over, I can come back and have some fun for a while. I believe in spooks, but maybe because when you get old, you want to believe in something.”

We walk in the haunted trailer. It is indeed the nicest trailer I’ve ever been in. I walk past the kitchen and there to the left, one on top of the other, stands the washer and dryer. After a shower, I head to the living room, the part of the trailer furthest from the washer and dryer and sit down to write up the day's adventure. Just as I arrive at the “spook” story, the bare light bulb on the porch starts  flickering. On and off it goes for several minutes. I call Lucie in and we stare at it together, shallowly laughing, and reassuring each other that the electrician had too much to drink. 

Eggs, bacon, and pancakes for breakfast. On the second cup of coffee, Dean, their neighbor, stops by to get instructions on how to look after the horses and dogs. The family is leaving on a short vacation at the end of the week. Dean is wearing a sleeveless shirt and has a tattoo on his arm that says, “Trust in God.”

Dean tells us about their neighbor and friend, Pete, who just passed away. 

“We’re all meeting at the grave, going to drink some beers and throw the empties on top of the coffin. Then cover it up. Hell, old Pete loved Busch, and I’ve got a six pack sittin’ in my fridge for near two years now. Nobody’ll drink it. Pete loved that beer. I’ll leave the whole case with him.”

Kevin pipes in, “Some other folks will be coming by, but I suppose we drink enough, we’ll all be good friends. You know, Pete and Kathy owned that little shop for twenty-seven years. I remember Mary went out of town a ways back for a couple days so I stopped by the shop for some canned soup. Got home and opened it up and there wasn’t nothin left but a dried up ball.”

“Gotta check the expiration on those things. Don’t think they last eleven years.”

Kevin tells us that we aren’t likely to catch a ride for some time out on his quiet stretch of high desert road. I suspect that he knows this isn’t true but just wants to take us a bit further on our journey.

As we drive through the desert, he tells us some Brown Park history. Irish Canyon, named after a band of Irish bandits who robbed a Rock Springs saloon and stopped to consume part of their take on the north side of the pass. They don’t seem to have much creativity for naming things out West. We stop at some Indian markings on the side of the road; a large boulder with an antlered elk, a bow and arrow, squiggly line, and the figure of a man with a square body and long arms. The tan engravings stick out among the mud-red rock. Kevin surveys the images, “Could be some old-timey teenage graffiti for all we know.” 

There is a dried-up lake where Butch Cassidy threw his gold one night while on the run to his hole-in-the-wall  hideout. The image makes me think of the Grateful Dead line, “I’ve heard it told, it’s hard to run with the weight of gold. On the other hand, I’ve heard it said, it’s just as hard with the weight of lead.”

We talk for a while about the media. I explain that the only lens of the country from living abroad for the last year was through news stories and some late-night comedians. It seemed so evident to me that everyone had lost their minds and the country was about ready to kill each other. When, in fact, throughout the dozens of rides we’d had from Boston to New Hampshire, to North Carolina to Missouri and onward west, we’d only been treated with kindness from complete strangers. More often than not, the conversations were interesting, open-minded, and always respectful.

“Well, it seems to me the couple companies that own all the media stand to make a whole lot more money starting trouble than fixing it. Some firefighters start fires. And by our nature, we’re fascinated. Sometimes we even dance around them. Do that long enough though and you’re bound to get burned.”

I ask him what he means.

“You ever read the debates between Lincoln and Douglas? People used to stand in parks for hours listening to two men talk. They’ve created this reality show for sound bites and ratings. The founders of this country new that a free press was necessary for a free society. They were meant to be the people that poked, prodded, and peaked behind the people in power. Now, for the most part, they just tell you what to think and that doesn’t sit well with me”.

The conversation wanders to the Czech Republic. Kevin tells of us his Czech friend named Karl. “He smuggled people across the Iron Curtain for years, usually taking them across the boarder on skis, until one day the suitcases  he was holding while skiing down a mountain were shot to pieces. He managed to escape but couldn’t get the courage to return to the eastern side. He lost all his hair within a few weeks from the stress. When the Wall came down in ‘89  and Karl finally saw his mother again, damn if he didn’t come back with a full head of hair!” 

Kevin would’ve taken us all the way to Rock Springs if he had the gas. Instead, He gives us his number and address and we are dropped in the desert, 27 miles from Rock Springs. The sun is just reaching mid-day and two buzzards circle lazily above us as we walk down the deserted interstate. It's incredible. Lucie is happy the first truck that passes didn’t pick us up because she wants to walk in the desert. We make it about two miles before we accept a ride from two young elk hunters. They were out this morning with their bows scouting trails. They take us to Rock Springs where we catch a ride on the only highway running north out of town towards the Tetons. The old man didn’t have room in his truck, so we ride in the bed going eighty miles per hour for  115 miles. It doesn’t take us long to realize the best way is to sit with our backs to the cab, looking out backwards. Otherwise, the wind hurts the ears after a while. 

What an amazing feeling to be traveling so fast, yet moving so slow in that great expanse of wilderness. The mountains slip by, glacier-like. By the end of the ride, I feel  like I got to know them, admiring hidden valleys and rock faces revealed as we edged along.